To everyone who joined these forums at some point, and got discouraged by the negativity and left after a while (or even got literally scared off): I'm sorry.

I wasn't good enough at encouraging people to be kinder, and removing people who refuse to be kind. Encouraging people is hard, and removing people creates conflict, and I hate conflict... so that's why I wasn't better at it.

I was a very, very sensitive teen. The atmosphere of this forum as it is now, if it had existed in 1996, would probably have upset me far more than it would have helped.

I can handle quite a lot of negativity and even abuse now, but that isn't the point. I want to help people. I want to help the people who need it the most, and I want to help people like the 1996 version of me.

I'm still figuring out the best way to do that, but as it is now, these forums are doing more harm than good, and I can't keep running them.

Thank you to the few people who have tried to understand my point of view so far. I really, really appreciate you guys. You are beautiful people.

Everyone else: If after everything I've said so far, you still don't understand my motivations, I think it's unlikely that you will. We're just too different. Maybe someday in the future it might make sense, but until then, there's no point in arguing about it. I don't have the time or the energy for arguing anymore. I will focus my time and energy on people who support me, and those who need help.

-SoulRiser

The forums are mostly read-only and are in a maintenance/testing phase, before being permanently archived. Please use this time to get the contact details of people you'd like to keep in touch with. My contact details are here.

Please do not make a mirror copy of the forums in their current state - things will still change, and some people have requested to be able to edit or delete some of their personal info.

So, I'm learning about the law of sine, and this is one of the problems I have to do. I can't get teacher help for it, so I may as well ask you guys. I want to know how to do it.

"Margaret has two lengths of fence, 20 meters and 24 meters, for two sides of a triangular chicken pen. The third side will be on the north side of the barn. One fence length makes a 75° angle with the barn. How many different pens can she build if one fence is attached at the corner of the barn? What are all the possible lengths for the barn side of the pen?"

I can do this more easily without the law of sines, primarily because I don't remember it. Unfortunately, the program I was writing my explanation in crashed and I am too lazy to rewrite it.

HOWEVER, you will find that if the 24-foot fence is the one making the 75° angle, it will be impossible to form a full triangle. So only one configuration is possible.

Hello, traveler.

This is an ancient account I have not used in a long time. My views have changed much in the intervening months and years.

Nonetheless, I refuse to clean it up. Pretending that I've held my current views since the beginning of time is what we in the industry call a lie. Asking people to do so contributes to moralistic self-loathing. "See, those people have nothing damning! I do! I'm truly vile!"

Because you can never be a good person with a single blemish on the moral record, I thought that simply entertaining some thoughts made me irredeemable. Though I don't care for his writing style, William Faulkner presents a good counterexample. He went from being a typical Southern racist to supporting the civil rights movement. These days we'd yell at him for that, probably.

People are allowed to change their views.

Nevertheless, this period of my life has informed some of how I am today. In good ways and bad ways. To purge it would be to do a disservice to history. Perhaps it will not make anyone sympathetic, but it may help someone understand.

If, after reading all this, you still decide to use the post above as evidence that I am evil today, ask yourself if you have never disagreed with the moral code you now follow. In all likelihood you did, at some point. If some questions are verboten, and the answer is "how dare you ask that," don't expect your ideological opponents to ever change their minds.

Let's assume there are three sides to a triangle: a, b, and c
Opposite each side is an angle: A, B, and C, respectively

The law of sines is as follows:
a/sin(A) = b/sin(B) = c/sin(C)

There are two different ways to plug in your problem if we assume the barn side (and angle opposite) is c:
20/sin(75) = 24/sin(B) = c/sin(C), or
20/sin(A) = 24/sin(75) = c/sin(C)

Uh oh. Looks like we've run into ambiguous case; you may remember the unsolvable SSA (or ASS, hehe) from geometry, and that's what this is. To a triangle like this, there may either be zero, one, or two solutions, depending on the information given.

EDIT: Look up Law of Sines, Ambiguous Case. It's complicated at first, indeed, but you'll master it once you get the hang of it.

I'm the opposite; I've found most trigonometry to be far easier than calculus, though I'll admit that finding limits is significantly better than solving ambiguous case. (I'm better with the law of cosines anyway)

This is an ancient account I have not used in a long time. My views have changed much in the intervening months and years.

Nonetheless, I refuse to clean it up. Pretending that I've held my current views since the beginning of time is what we in the industry call a lie. Asking people to do so contributes to moralistic self-loathing. "See, those people have nothing damning! I do! I'm truly vile!"

Because you can never be a good person with a single blemish on the moral record, I thought that simply entertaining some thoughts made me irredeemable. Though I don't care for his writing style, William Faulkner presents a good counterexample. He went from being a typical Southern racist to supporting the civil rights movement. These days we'd yell at him for that, probably.

People are allowed to change their views.

Nevertheless, this period of my life has informed some of how I am today. In good ways and bad ways. To purge it would be to do a disservice to history. Perhaps it will not make anyone sympathetic, but it may help someone understand.

If, after reading all this, you still decide to use the post above as evidence that I am evil today, ask yourself if you have never disagreed with the moral code you now follow. In all likelihood you did, at some point. If some questions are verboten, and the answer is "how dare you ask that," don't expect your ideological opponents to ever change their minds.